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Islam DOES NOT EQUAL terrorism. To repeat: Islam DOES NOT EQUAL terrorism.

Omar Mateen, the shooter who murdered 49 people in Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, is a terrorist. Whether or not he had ties to ISIS, he is a terrorist. But being Muslim has nothing to do with his act of homophobia and violence.

Mateen is a terrorist because he willfully planned to walk into a gay club and murder queer people during Pride month. Specifically, he planned this on Latino night, when Pulse would be filled with queer people of color. His intention was to spread fear so that queer people and queer people of color across the country and the world would feel threatened. If this is not terrorism, I don’t know what is.

If CNN wants to make this a conversation about terrorism, fine. It is terrorism. But this is not a conversation about ISIS or FBI watch lists. To give ISIS credit is to dismiss our own complicity in this attack. Mateen was an American citizen, fed on our values of homophobia and xenophobia. And the longer we derail the conversation to be about ISIS and the same gun control speeches that get us nowhere, we become even further mired in the problem.

Mateen is us. He is every homophobic slur we hear on the street, every homophobic law being passed, every racist comment from Trump and on the news against the Latinx community. He is the product of an American culture which prays to stop gun violence, but in every conceivable way each day says the lives of queer people and queer people of color don’t matter. And now, we are making the situation worse by buying into the belief that this attack was motivated by Islam. We are showing ourselves to be Islamophobic, as well as homophobic and xenophobic.

This attack cannot become an excuse to commit further violence against Muslims. We cannot dismiss Mateen as an Islamic terrorist whose motivations are worlds away from American values. Neither can we cannot dismiss Mateen as “mentally unstable” or diagnose him with bipolar or other mental health disorders, and claim his actions were caused by being mentally ill. We cannot let this attack divide us.

Please, understand the following facts:

Mateen is a terrorist because he planned to use large scale violence to inspire fear among queer people and queer people of color.